Hackaday links: September 19, 2010

Ever wondered what’s going on inside that chip as the program executes? Now you can take a look at the die itself with this visual gate simulator for the 6502 processor. [Thanks Puli and Svofski]

Copper corrosion

[Moogle] cracked open his DockStar to find corroded copper. It seems that Seagate left a portion of the ground plane unprotected and it reacted badly with the shielding metal. If you have one of these devices you might want to crack it open and tin the exposed copper so that it will hold up over time.

Segway kickstand

Don’t want your Segway to flop over when you park it? Follow [Paul’s] lead in building a kickstand for the self-balancer. You can just make it out in the image above. It’s a dumbell that folds down from the handlebar tube when you’re not on board.

i wonder if it was out of tune because its hard to play in those suits or they need to tune up their tesla soundsystem. they should doit again with an MP3 bc you cant tell if they’re really playing the guitar anyway. Awesome nonetheless.

I am impressed with the 6502 simulator. From reading the presentation, there are plans to gate level simluate the Apple II which would be GREAT (especially Wosniak’s revolutionary Disk II drive that made affordable disk based storage available for the home market)

Nice collection of links HAD :) Love the gate simulator! The smoking machine reminds me of our middle school science fair project. We used running water to create suction on the cigarette and a majority of the tar was collected in the tube behind the butt. That was our smoking machine lol.
Next year we did a Pulsed Ionic Induction drive VERY similar to the “caterpillar” drives on big nuke boomers at the time ala Hunt for Red October. Hint: The drive works the on the same principle as combing your hair and attracting the faucet trickle with the static charge ;) Again, wonderful collection of links :) Keep it up HAD :)

Anyone who is seriously interested in simulating CPUs and seeing what is really going inside can try FPGA. This is not going to be gate-level simulation of the original CPU, but you will be able to see how individual signals and busses in your Verilog or VHDL model change as the CPU is crunching. To run simulations, you do not even need a development kit, but the real fun begins when you tap into a working design of course.

As for the dockstar, I found that everything sold has some issue, it’s good to find what it is since if you can fix it yourself as in this case you are golden and you won’t find the flaw later.
But seriously, it’s a rule, everything has at least one (sort of obvious) flaw, from spaceshuttle to flashdisk.
That’s also handy since if you come across a review of something and they report all is perfect and don’t mention a nagging flaw then you know the reviewer is either not trying hard or he’s paid off (I’d say the last one is slightly more common than the first one)